Anarcadia – Ruth Maclennan

The centrepiece of Ruth Maclennan’s solo exhibition is a newly commissioned and eponymously titled 37-minute video work shot in high definition and set in Kazakhstan’s spectacular desert terrains. In the opening sequence, a vast expanse of land, dotted with what resemble redundant telegraph poles or disused railway signals, suggests a place once inhibited but now abandoned to the past, cut off from the present. In Anarcadia,two characters, ‘a geological surveyor’ and ‘the equally iconic figure of an archaeologist’, play out scenes in which they each tell stories in the form of personal testimonies about this land. The geologist’s reflections are fuelled by scientific and business-like jargon, and encompass anecdote, snippets of wisdom and expressions of brutal honesty: ‘I came here years ago and made a fortune, but now it’s used up,’ and: ‘Behind every great fortune lays a great crime.’ In contrast, the archeologist assumes an altogether more sombre persona. As she wanders among the debris and desolation of derelict buildings as if in a quest to uncover evidence of a past, of human existence, her quietly spoken but intensely emotive words and expressions are delivered with an overriding sense of melancholy and loss. She asks: ‘What happened to the capital that wasn’t?’

These characters never appear together on screen, enhancing a sense of the physical and emotional chasm between them. Although their soliloquies are delivered with equal conviction, the more they reveal, the less certain we can be of their authenticity as their streams of consciousness seemingly fluctuate between truths and half-truths, fact and fiction. The film’s verisimilitude belies a sense that there is some jiggery-pokery going on here – all is not what it seems. The title of this piece itself suggests as much, alluding to something both real and imagined, if you like, a sort of fabricated reality.

In an adjacent space, Maclennan presents an installation which includes a series of new photographs of desolate desert scenes alongside a small but fascinating collection of archival material garnered from her personal collection and from the State Documentary Film and Audio Archive of Kazakhstan. These different elements almost work together as a piece in its own right, but ultimately they function to further embellish ideas explored in Anarcadia. The Railway Workers,1939-61is a series of black and white photographs depicting the construction of railway stations in unidentified desert locations. Reminiscent in composition to Social Realism, these ‘authentic’ documents of the past not only echo some of the abandoned territories in Anarcadia, as a form of state propaganda, they also tell their own story – literally and metaphorically – about how history is constructed through fact and fiction. A short propaganda film loop titled Bringing oil across the desert to all the Soviet lands from 1930 provides another representation ofthe past, next to which three Soviet posters from 1989 celebrate 70 years of the subbotnik. On another wall, an elaborately embroidered wall hanging from Uzbekistan, with the dates ‘191XII – 1970’ sown at the bottom, offers yet another form of ‘evidence’ of the past…

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